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Ahh!! Jean Marc you seemed to have hit the crux of the problem of keeping bees in these risky times with mites and there viruses.Because I have my lowest loses with new queens over winter, I have in the past two queened everthing,splitting and installing a young laying queen as early as possible in the spring and uniting the two in sept.Old queen is usually killed by the younger one.These two queeners require intensive management, prone to swarming, get to be 7-8 or more high, fall over easily,require a step ladder to pull honey, and are hard on both men and equipment.Large bee populations can be scary if hot or Africanized.Make for long days and long weeks in the extracting room. They do quite often produce more than two and one half times what a single queen colony would produce, they start the flow early, no waiting for build upon the flow, if my timing and feeding are co-ordinated.Several options are avaiable when you get a large population early, pulling one or two frames for nuc's in june or Aug1 .Early nuc's are with cells and later on nuc's are with laying queens,these can be boosted after queen is up and running, or if two young queens are present in each brood chamber in the fall , a box containing half honey and half empty frames is added as a second and feed is put on.This last option is for quick expansion of colony numbers.I rarely have time to do all this nucing that I should be doing. Bees and honey both are not cheap to produce, vary sometimes greatly with each season, but if you have the bees the honey usually follows
I am thinking that mite resistant bees, say Keefus line, that have been in existence for a number of years, the number or sequence of genes, alleles, it is so fragile, easily out crossed, or lost by outside breeding that it would be difficult but not impossible to keep, easier if all your neighbors have the same genes.
Mr Robertson should be commended for his work with these lines,colonies, which continued to increase in honey production as well as a certain amount of mite resistance and I understand his work is not finished yet.It would seem this selection of lines is slower than the bond method of live or let die, but in that method one could end up with nothing, everything dead
I am thinking that mite resistant bees, say Keefus line, that have been in existence for a number of years, the number or sequence of genes, alleles, it is so fragile, easily out crossed, or lost by outside breeding that it would be difficult but not impossible to keep, easier if all your neighbors have the same genes.
Mr Robertson should be commended for his work with these lines,colonies, which continued to increase in honey production as well as a certain amount of mite resistance and I understand his work is not finished yet.It would seem this selection of lines is slower than the bond method of live or let die, but in that method one could end up with nothing, everything dead
